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🪵 The Threshold

Individual speech-in-noise success depends on which abilities underpin each situation

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tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships

3 min read

Individual speech-in-noise success depends on which abilities underpin each situation

Evidence

The results suggest that the importance of a particular variable often, but not always, depends on the listening situation. Hearing sensitivity (PTA) and a basic WM task correlated with intelligibility in all tested situations. The results for PTA are somewhat surprising given that all speech testing was done at sensitivity-adjusted levels, which might have been expected to equate for PTA differences. The PTA measure may therefore capture some aspect of hearing that is not well represented by SRT. The importance of WM for intelligibility is less surprising. However, the rather basic, storage-based WM task appeared to capture a more general benefit, at least in the tested listening situations, than the often-used RST. While the RST did predict intelligibility, the effect was stronger for acoustically difficult listening situations (low SNR). The data provide support for the notion that the relationship between RST and speech perception depends on the listening situations and that inconsistent results in the literature may have occurred because not all speech tasks engage WM processes enough to lead to a reliable correlation. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1277 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Understanding the causes for speech-in-noise (SiN) perception difficulties is complex, and is made even more difficult by the fact that listening situations can vary widely in target and background sounds. While there is general agreement that both auditory and cognitive factors are important, their exact relationship to SiN perception across various listening situations remains unclear. This study manipulated the characteristics of the listening situation in two ways: first, target stimuli were either isolated words, or words heard in the context of low- (LP) and high-predictability (HP) sentences; second, the background sound, speech-modulated noise, was presented at two signal-to-noise ratios. Speech intelligibility was measured for 30 older listeners (aged 62–84) with age-normal hearing and related to individual differences in cognition (working memory, inhibition and linguistic skills) and hearing (PTA0.25–8 kHz and temporal processing). The results showed that while the effect of hearing thresholds on intelligibility was rather uniform, the influence of cognitive abilities was more specific to a certain listening situation. By revealing a complex picture of relationships between intelligibility and cognition, these results may help us understand some of the inconsistencies in the literature as regards cognitive contributions to speech perception. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1226 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Individual listeners differ in which abilities support their speech perception per situation; Which cognitive ability predicts speech-in-noise intelligibility depends on the listening situation — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1277; Cognitive abilities affect speech-in-noise perception situation-specifically while hearing thresholds act uniformly — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1226 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

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